The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Feb. 01, 2011
Filed:
Feb. 28, 2007
Shai Herzog, Bellevue, WA (US);
Marie Hagman, Seattle, WA (US);
Shai Herzog, Bellevue, WA (US);
Marie Hagman, Seattle, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
Architecture for maintaining connection state of network address translation (NAT) devices by employing an out-of-band (OOB) technique externally to application connections without imposing additional requirements on the underlying native application(s). The OOB solution can be applied to arbitrary connections without requiring modification to an application protocol and works with TCP and UDP. A keep-alive (KA) application is employed as an OOB mechanism that injects KA packets that appear to the NAT device to be coming from the native connection. These injected packets fool the NAT device into resetting the inactivity timer for that connection, but do not fool or confuse the native application, which is oblivious to the spoofing. Accordingly, the connection will not terminate due to NAT timeouts, and therefore, a client/server protocol, for example, will not need to generate fake activity packets to keep the connection alive.